[Movies] Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (2009)

Ron Moore's reimagination of Battlestar Galactica was a landmark creation that helped bring science fiction to a broader audience and give hope to other science fiction fans that there was hope yet for the genre. In a time when major science fiction serials like Star Trek weren't at their best, to have a show like this come along and bring new life to science fiction entertainment was quite the relief.

Of course when the show ended with four power-packed seasons, a lot of us BSG fans were left wanting more. Naturally Hollywood won't let such a marketable franchise disappear into the vast darkness of space just yet, and thus we've seen new BSG-related projects like the potential TV series Caprica and then of course movies like this one.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is a direct-to-DVD TV movie that attempts to tell more of the story of the Cylons set during the first two seasons of the original show. The "movie" of sorts features a lot of clips from those seasons along with new material that has been sort of "inserted" into the story to give us a new perspective on the whole series. The movie was directed by Edward James Olmos, who played Commander Adama in the show.

Image via Wikipedia

The story starts out interestingly enough - the movie is set from the perspective of the Cylons after all, and thus this immediately brings One (Dean Stockwell) into the forefront of things as he fulfills his role as de facto leader of the Cylons. Given his knowledge of many things that the others were oblivious too, he clearly uses this to his advantage to manipulate events as he saw fit. At the same time, we get to see more of the other Cylon models that didn't get as much screen time in the original series, with Four (Rick Worthy) being one of those who benefited the most given his expanded story.

The show had a lot of good points, to be fair, like how they decided to explain the story of Boomer (Grace Park) and how she executed her missions as a sleeper agent and even the little bits about other models like Five (Matthew Bennett) and why he wears those darned suits. It has its share of serious moments and lighter campy bits which certainly help expand the universe.

However in terms of the supposed "Plan" that the Cylons were following, I didn't feel like the movie actually explained that well enough. If we just use what they presented as the basis of this plan, then it's not at all complex. Item 1: Destroy the 12 Colonies. Item 2: Keep the Final Five alive as long as possible so they suffer their humanity. Item 3: Destroy the human survivors from within.

Obviously, they failed at their mission except possible for Item 2.

The overall look and feel of the movie felt rather odd as well. It seemed somehow...brighter than usual. The shots were clearly different and overall execution didn't make it truly feel like part of the BSG universe. Plus given the volume of recycled clips from the original show, the entire thing ended up feeling a lot some very long DVD extra feature that doesn't stand too well on its own.

If SyFy is going to continue to attempt to milk the BSG franchise, this is not the way to do it. Seriously.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan gets 2 silly costumes for Cylons in the Fleet out of a possible 5.